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An evaporating two-State solution

For those who follow politics in the Middle East talk of some two-State solution seems ever-more impossible to realise. If nothing else practicalities on the ground suggest that it simply could not be achieved. What, move or re-settle perhaps some 400,000 settlers now occupying the West Bank. And then there is Gaza? What to do there?

Dissident Voice in a piece "Fearing a One-State Solution, Israel’s President Serves Pabulum to Washington" claims that President Peres sees the two-State solution evaporating:

"Whatever will happen in the future, we shall not repeat the mistakes we made in leaving Gaza.

– Shimon Peres to members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations 2/18/09

You take my water. Burn my Olive Trees. Destroy my house. Take my job. Steal my Land. Imprison my Mother. Bomb my country. Starve us all. Humiliate us all. But I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.

– Sign carried near Hyde Park Corner during a demonstration in London on 2/15/09 by a Member of the British Parliament

Ain el Helwe Palestinian Refugee Camp, Sidon, Lebanon — Israeli President Shimon Peres has participated in shaping the policies of Israel for most of its existence. His Washington Post op-ed last week billed as “a peacepartners prod” to the Obama administration, evidences a major disconnect within the government of Israel concerning what is urgently required for that country’s increasingly unlikely long-term survival.

According to a CIA Study currently being shown to selected staff members on the US Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Israel’s survival in its present form beyond the next 20 years is doubtful.

The Report predicts “an inexorable movement away from a two-state to a one-state solution, as the most viable model based on democratic principles of full equality that sheds the looming specter of colonial Apartheid while allowing for the return of the 1947/1948 and 1967 refugees. The latter being the precondition for sustainable peace in the region.”

To President Peres’ chagrin, the Executive Summary states that “during the next fifteen years more than two million Israelis, including some 500,000 Israeli citizens who currently hold US green cards or passports, will move to the United States. Most Israelis not in possession of these documents will receive ‘expedited waivers.’ The Report claims that, “Alongside a decline in Jewish births and a rise in Palestinian fertility, approximately 1.6 million Israelis are likely to return to their forefather’s lands in Russia and Eastern and Western Europe with scores of thousands electing to stay, depending on the nature of the transition.”

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